Sarah Olney: It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis) in this debate. I rise to speak to amendment 36, tabled in my name and the names of right hon. and hon. Members from across the House, and to pay tribute to the hon. Member for Walthamstow (Stella Creasy) for her hard work in drafting and tabling it.
In a nutshell, as the hon. Lady has already said, we do not know what thisthe Bill covers, and neither do the Government. The Government’s dashboard lists just over 2,400 EU-derived laws; the former Minister, the hon. Member for Watford (Dean Russell), who is no longer in his place, admitted that that was,
“an authoritative, not comprehensive, catalogue”
of the legislation. The National Archives, based in Kew in my constituency, has identified significant omissions in the Government’s dashboard, and the Financial Times has suggested the true total could be closer to 4,000 pieces of legislation. We simply do not know what we are voting on today.
Amendment 36 would ensure that the Government produced a definitive list of legislation to be revoked or reformed through this Bill, to ensure that the scope of  the work is clear to everyone. As things stand, there is a risk that some laws will fall automatically if the relevant Department has not identified them.
The amendment would also ensure that Parliament has the ultimate say on which legislation is affected by the Bill, giving Members of this House the power to amend the revocation list by adding or removing instruments. It is important to remember that, when we talk about retained EU law, we are talking about legislation that guarantees a host of rights, including workers’ rights such as holiday pay and maternity pay, data protection rights and legislation that determines our animal welfare and food quality standards. Yet we could see huge swathes of law revoked or reformed with no parliamentary scrutiny or consultation—and it is not just parliamentarians who are concerned; hundreds of my constituents have emailed me in support of this amendment.
This Bill is simply an undemocratic power grab by the Conservative Government. It is not acceptable for the Government to make arbitrary but legally binding decisions on behalf of the whole country without following a proper legislative process. This is a Bill completely devoid of Parliamentaryparliamentary oversight and accountability, and it will be our constituents who suffer from declining standards as a result.
Liberal Democrats are extremely concerned about the potential for environmental deregulation through this Bill, which the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds has described as an “attack on nature”. The UK is already one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world, and the Government cannot afford to relax regulation. We urgently need better regulation in this area and better resources to implement and monitor that regulation, yet the agencies responsible for regulating our air and water quality and preventing pollution have been rendered toothless by this Government.
Just this week, in my constituency, Thames Water has announced plans to replace water from the River Thames at Teddington Lock with treated sewage in times of drought. Who is going towill be monitoring the water quality to ensure that that treated sewageit maintains a high water quality standard? There is huge concern among my constituents. The last thing they want to hear is that the existing regulations to maintain water quality standards through the River Thames will just be scrapped and that whatever is put in place to replace it will not have adequate parliamentary scrutiny. What arewill the Government going to do to ensure that agencies responsible for monitoring Thames Water are held to account? I hope the Minister in their closing remarks will address the concerns already raised in this debate about how the Government will ensure that thisthe Bill does not put our environment further at risk.
I am also concerned that thisthe Bill will cause yet more economic damage and uncertainty for businessbusinesses and households at the worst possible time. By setting a deadline of the end of 2023 for thousands of pieces of legislation to be scrapped, the Government are creating an unnecessary cliff edge. It is unrealistic for officials to trawl through and effectively scrutinise thousands of laws, and enact replacements, in less than 12 months.
When I am out and about talking to businesses and business groups, they tell me that the one thing our economy needs right now is certainty. How can they  possibly have that certainty when so many of the regulations that underpin their operations are just going to be scrapped? The other thing they tell me is that they like a clear regulatory environment, as it creates a competitive playing field and gives consumers confidence. What they really like is parliamentary scrutiny of that regulation, which they believe creates good regulation and good law.
It is likely that many key sectors will be left in legislative confusion, with EU laws scrapped and no UK laws to take their place. After years of low growth due to Conservative incompetence, and months of worsening business conditions, the last thing businesses need is increased barriers to trade and more uncertainty—yet that is what this Bill will bring.
To conclude, the Bill is an undemocratic power grab that gives Conservative Ministers the power to eliminate vital pieces of legislation. There is no comprehensive list of legislation that will be affected by the Bill, and Parliament has no say over its scope. The Liberal Democrats will vote against the Bill. It is unnecessary and unrealistic, and it will serve only to cause more uncertainty while potentially eliminating or watering down key protections for our constituents. At the very least, I urge the Government to accept amendment 36 to increase the transparency of the laws that are impacted by the Bill and ensure that Parliament is not sidestepped in such an important process.

Marcus Fysh: I voted for the independence that we gained from leaving the EU, as did many of my constituents. But they and I want to see us take advantage of the flexibility to make our own law that that independence gives us. That is the point of Brexit, and I think that one of the frustrations for people around the country has been in not seeing that taken to its logical conclusion.
The Bill is an overdue but welcome part of that. It is necessary because we are looking to streamline our systems and give them precision and certainty through a full framework of UK law-making, not EU judge-led interpretation and code. We need the Bill for the flexibility and agility that it will give us in being able to promote competitiveness and law that is appropriate to our conditions in these islands, and focus on the things that are important to our constituents. We need those laws to be accountable to them. We need the Bill for practicality and pace in achieving that. We do not need the process of engaging with the review of our retained EU law to be hamstrung by the House of Lords, or for the order paperOrder Paper to be commandeered by interest groups and Opposition Members.
We need to establish this common law framework by which our law can evolve. We do not want it to be subject to enduring purposive confusion and obstruction by European Court of Justice judgments, which inevitably affect the interpretation of law that originated from EU sources. We need the Bill to focus on those things. We need it not to be confused on these matters by arguments from the other, unelected, House. As people have mentioned, there are extensive powers in the Bill to provide that there are no lacunae in our laws by virtue of the revocation and the sunset. There are powers to restate and remake our law should those lacunae appear.
Overall, the Bill is essential to send a clear message to the government machine that it needs to apply itself now and finish the work that it has started. I am  confident that it can and will do that. The civil servants whom I have seen working on these things are extremely dedicated and absolutely able to achieve that. After we pass the Bill, we need Ministers in every Department to step up and lead. They absolutely can do that, and they can do it well—there is time, but it will require a coherent process. They need to be focused on triage and prioritisation, with assistance from, at the centre, the Brexit opportunities group in the Cabinet Office, about which we have heard. That group can commission outside counsel to help with that process, to drill down into the most important things to achieve and to achieve them efficiently, and to set up common law frameworks for the evolution, clarification and elaboration of our principles in common law on all these matters.
It is also very important that that process involves practitioners from industry. Sometimes, we listen too much to the CEOs of big companies and the heads of various industry bodies, who often are political in their outlook, rather than thinking about the practicalities of getting from A to B and coming up with proposals that would make a genuine positive difference to how our laws and regulations evolve. We need to ensure that we have those mid-level practitioners present in these discussions to ensure that the practical avenues are taken up.
In response to my right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis), one thing that Ministers might like to think about is whether, in these things wherechoosing to bring to the Floor of the House those matters that we can make a big practical difference, they might choose to bring those matters to the Floor of the House on, so that we can examine them more, help to champion them and celebrate what we are doing. That might be a thing something that we could all agree on. I am confident that if we pass thisthe Bill unamended, we can together bring more precision and clarity to how our law evolves. The Bill will be of tremendous advantage to all the United Kingdom.

Bambos Charalambous: I rise to speak in support of amendments 18, 19, 21, 24 and 36. What is clear from the Government is that this Bill is ideologically driven, lacks common sense, avoids parliamentary scrutiny and puts rights and protections that we have had for many years at risk of being revoked and deleted. In short, thisthe Bill plays Russian roulette with our rights and protections, and the Government cannot even tell us how many or give us an exhaustive list of which ones. When the Government unite groups ranging from the RSPB to the Law Society in opposition to the Bill, they should take note. This Bill creates uncertainty and is careering at great speed towards the edge of a cliff on 31 December 2023.
If the Government want to ensure that workers’ rights and environmental protections are not lost, they will have no problem in accepting amendments 19 and 21, which would exclude those rights and protections from the 31 December sunset clause and stop them from falling off a cliff edge. The Government have adopted 31 December as the date for the sunset clause, but they have not told us why. If they cannot even provide a definitive list of all the EU retained law that will be revoked in time for that date, surely that suggests we need more time to get the list ready.
Considering the wide range and extent of the rights and protections that we know about, surely having a longer sunset clause will help the Government to give  greater certainty, which we were told was one of the reasons for thisthe Bill. The Government should therefore have no problem at all in accepting amendment 18, which extends the sunset clause to 2026. It would also allow the Government greater opportunity to bring Bills for primary legislation, allowing greater scrutiny by thisthe House in replacing the retained law that they propose to delete.
The Minister has continually failed to answer the question of exactly how many retained EU laws will be revoked under the sunset clause, and I do not understand why that is a problem. Surely all the retained EU law is there before us, and we should be able to find out exactly which regulations need to be retained and which will be deleted? There is no excuse. No new EU law has come about since we left the European Union, so that retained law should be easy to find. I cannot understand why we do not know which laws will be revoked under this Bill.
Amendment 36 requires the Government to publish an exhaustive list of every piece of legislation that is to be revoked under the sunset clause. Parliament should not be asked to vote on the revocation of these laws when we are not aware of which laws or how many there are. We need to be told, because that is one of the very points of having this Bill before us.
On the Henry VIII powers that the Bill gives to Ministers, which are designed to avoid parliamentary scrutiny, what are the Government afraid of? We should have parliamentary sovereignty; we should be the ones to decide which laws we want to retain and to revoke. Primary legislation should be brought for the laws that are revoked. There is no excuse for the clause to be there. Do the Government deny that there is a need for primary legislation? There will be laws revoked for which there will need to be legislation. Which ones are they and why can they not be put into a Bill and brought before this House? That would be give the House greater scrutiny and allow us to ensure that we do not accidentally lose certain laws.
The Bill is a bonfire of our rights and protections. The haste with which it is being brought through Parliament and the 2023 sunset clause put us in serious danger of things being accidentally revoked and our rights and protections being lost. The amendments proposed make a bad Bill better, and the Government would be wise to support them. If the Government press ahead with the Bill unamended, they will have to explain to the House when any rights and protections are lost after 31 December, and they cannot then say that they were not warned.